The “Right to Love:” Connecting “Gay” and “Marriage” through Identity Deployment Tactics

• In Event: 106 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Tactics and Repertoires

Abstract

In this paper, I draw from interviews with 47 key informants who participated in California’s marriage equality movement, participant observations, and documentary data to examine the tactics and the collective action frames about same-sex marriage initiated by activists after Proposition 8’s passage in 2008. I begin by discussing the equal rights and love and commitment collective action frames that were constructed by early marriage activists in reaction to the special rights and harm to children frames perpetuated by the Religious Right. Many participants were angry that the No on Prop 8 campaign’s collective action frame, unfair and unequal did not include adequate and accurate depictions of same-sex couples or same-sex marriage. Feelings of marginalization, invisibility, and rejection at this exclusion led post-8 activists to reject the equal rights frame, instead choosing a right to love frame that argues that love is an emotion that all people experience and desire. Activists also employed tactics that required identity disclosure in order to “change hearts and minds.” Recent scholarship has conceptualized the LGBT movement as shifting between “protest cycles” during which the movement shifts its emphasis between mobilizing around sameness or difference (Ghaziani et al. 2016). Activists’ construction of the right to love frame, is illustrative of a shift toward sameness, as are their tactical innovations. As activists share their everyday lives through digital media or personal stories, they reference the cultural meanings of marriage – love, commitment, family – that are shared by both same-sex and heterosexual couples.

Author

• Anna Sorensen, SUNY Potsdam